is a statement that has always felt, to me, like it trailed off into despair and hopelessness. It's the kind of thing you say in the face of overwhelming, urgent problems, when you don't know what else to say.

How many of us have felt the consistent - even constant - urge toward productivity? Parenting over this past year has never felt more like a full-time job, all-encompassing. The presence of all of the members of our small family at home, at the same time, day after day, served to make that full-time job feel something like the boss with no boundaries, who texts you at midnight and wonders why you look tired over breakfast the next morning.

The pandemic has taught me, among so many other things, that silence and solitude are restorative practices. Now, the stillness I craved over those months has returned in unpredictable ways, often accompanied by an uncertainty over how long that stillness will last, or a creeping anxiety over when I might expect to encounter it again. As I reacquaint myself with stillness, I notice a cruel surprise: my urge for productivity has become reflexive and nagging.  

It wasn't always this way. I used to feel inspired by tackling projects, large and small. Short-term projects like a homemade butter pie crust with the season's fresh fruit, or longer-term projects like a semester-long class. Now, each completed task no longer brings the same sense of fullness and satisfaction. Instead it seems to lead to another task depressingly...uncompleted. 

When productivity is driven entirely by an outside source, when it seems to stem from anxiety rather than quelling it, I notice that some forms of productivity are rooted in scarcity and shame. Somehow there is not enough, or I am not enough, or both, if I am not meeting standards of success outlined by systems that rely on enslaved labor in order to prosper. 

To return to stillness, I have thought about the well-known story of The Tortoise or the Hare, which was retold with poetic musicality (and a surprise ending) by Toni Morrison and her son, Slade Morrison. The characters of Slowness and Speed reminded me of something: in order to acknowledge a slow creature, I have to slow down, myself.

Having limited energy can be seen as a problem, or it can be an acknowledgment of what is human in all of us. It can even reconnect us with nature, where the principles of energy accumulation and transfer are cyclical - not because the supply is unlimited, and therefore another kind of perfection to aspire to. Rather, because each of us has 'only so much' we can do.

Instead of viewing that from the negative, we might ask these positive questions instead: What are you going to do with the energy that you do have? How is it best directed?

We'll be taking some time in August to think about those questions, as we take a break from writing and sending this newsletter for the five Tuesdays of that month. In the meantime, there are two weeks of July left, and we are thrilled and honored to have two guest writers stepping in to send us off. Stay tuned for those, plus a special summer offering from us to y'all.

Yours in food, justice, and food justice,

Tay + Dor

photo of Chef Kelly Peterson by Christine Han